DreamsI've been keeping a dream journal on a special Twitter account since I was 23 years old. You can read these raw forms, if you'd like: @IHadaDreamWhere. I'm going to be adapting 99 of them as microstories.

Saturdays (mezzofiction)

Missy’s MissionWith the help of a friend, a young woman searches a rogue planet for the rumored means of getting rid of her special time powers, since having them puts her in the crosshairs of a psychotic time traveling killer.

My name is Nick Fisherman III. It's not my real name, but that's not because I'm trying to hide from my former agency, or something. I named myself after someone I've known for most of my life, and he chose it in honor of his late best friend. I took up writing when I found myself failing 8th grade science, and realized I might never reach my dream of becoming a biochemist, a meteorologist, and a quantum physicist. I started developing my canon after a scouting trip to an island inspired what I thought would be my first novel. I founded this website upon the advice of many people, who told me I needed to get my work out there, and not wait for an agent to accept my manuscript. You can expect one new story every day. Weekdays are for microstories, which are one or two paragraphs long. They're usually only thematically linked, so you won't have to read one to understand another, but they do sometimes tell a combined story. Sundays are for my continuous longer story, The Advancement of Leona Matic, which I started in the beginning, and won't end until 2066. Saturdays are for long series, most of which take place in the same universe as Leona, and add to the larger mythology.

Thursday, April 20, 2017

Microstory 564: Prisoners Fall Off the Face of Gavismet

About fifty zolmas off the coast of the mainland lies an island called Brihd. A century ago, Brihd discovered a way for its citizens to live in harmony with each other. Most people outside of their little country don’t believe it, but they claim to have built for themselves a paradise. They supposedly live in peace without crime or poverty, which they enjoy primarily because of their isolationism. But they are not completely cut off from the rest of the planet. They have also formed a sort of world police, and though many countries do not recognize their authority, with each case they choose, they’re generally allowed to cross borders and investigate. For the most part, they do a decent job of keeping crime down in other countries, and so we let them continue. After months, however, in a secret compartmentalized investigation, the Brihd world police uncovered a conspiracy that goes far beyond anything any nation has seen thus far. They’ve learned that every single prisoner with a severity level of three or above has completely disappeared. While overcrowding was once a problem in the majority of regions all over the globe, they are now mostly bare, left only with inmates with a strong chance of being released within a few years. The Brihd investigators, once realizing that something was amiss, began searching for not only answers, but a physical location.

The investigators possess at the moment only two theories for what happened to these prisoners. Either they were killed in a major holocaust, or they were all redirected to some hidden mega-prison. Neither of these makes any sense, though. We’re talking millions upon millions of people, from every single prison, in every single country. All jurisdictions so far have shown to be mostly empty of inmates. There is just no one place in the world that could account for these people, even if they’re now only corpses. If they didn’t leave a trace of where they had gone, then we should still be able to find some evidence of them now. There simply isn’t enough room on the planet...which is why some theorize that this is exactly where they’re not. They believe that the prisoners were all relocated to some secret off-world site. This is just as unlikely, however, as the nearest possible habitable planet is about .05 polmas away from our solar system, and we’ve only recently begun exploring the outer planets of our system, none of which can support life in any practical way. The amount of time it would take, at current technology, to reach another star system, lies at around a couple dozen years, and that’s assuming prisoners could survive on one of the neighboring exoplanets. Furthermore, this would also require a sizeable amount of money. Not only would we see evidence of that, but it would be more cost-effective to just leave them where they were. Believe it or not, this is actually the most plausible scenario. Brihd investigators are currently devoting the majority of their resources to figuring out whether it’s true, and if not, what the truth actually is.